


pictures of you, pictures of me

by your_bespoke_psychopath



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Crack, F/M, Not Beta Read, but mostly crack. and it's rubbish., minor spoilers for the new episode?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-21
Updated: 2013-04-21
Packaged: 2017-12-09 01:32:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,744
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/768420
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/your_bespoke_psychopath/pseuds/your_bespoke_psychopath
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clara stumbles upon a box filled with photo albums. The thing about albums is that you have to open them to see what they contain. And you have to remember that there are pictures and... pictures.<br/>If you know what I mean.</p>
            </blockquote>





	pictures of you, pictures of me

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mygirlfriday](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=mygirlfriday).



> inspired by the fact that in the new episode the Doctor took a selfie while hunting a ghost. the rest escalated quickly. plus, Pam is a hoar.  
> not beta read, it's almost 2am here, really. I may correct it tomorrow, or just delete it. now, my bed is calling me.

‘ _I am a Time Lord_ ,’ he said. ‘ _I have two hearts, a giant chin and a time machine_ ,’ he said. ‘ _All of time and space. You won’t even have to wait for breakfast. Fancy a spin?’_ he said.

How was she supposed to say ‘no’ to it? Especially to the breakfast part. It compensates for Doctor’s giant chin and the fact that most of the time they chase aliens. Or are being chased by aliens. Which is quite awesome if she’s to be honest, but a girl would like to visit a place where no mortal peril awaits her. And this is exactly what he promised her this time.

‘This time, no angry aliens, no soul-eating suns, no running!’ he exclaimed, skipping around the console. ‘Okay, maybe a bit of running, because we’re going to see the biggest intergalactic marathon! 34659746 species competing against each other! Imagine that! Some of the contestants have 12 legs. It tends to get quite messy, especially when they run into someone who does not have legs at all, or only one leg, but it’s a laugh. At least for the spectators. So! The intergalactic marathon, here we come!’

Except nothing like that happened. Instead of a colourful crowd cheering for the runners, they got sparks of electricity, choking smoke and violent shakes that send them flying into railings.

‘Extractor fans on!’ Doctor shouts and loud humming fills the room, while fans clean it from dense smoke. ‘Are you okay? What’s the matter, dear?’

Oh right. He talks to his ship. Great. No ‘how are you Clara? Are you fine? Didn’t my ship break your bones with her violent shaking?’ Instead he strokes the console soothingly and starts typing something on the keyboard there.

‘What did just happen?’ she asks, because really, she’s the one who got thrown on the metal railing, she wants to know why it happened. A promise that it won’t happen again would be nice as well.

‘Uhm... It seems that,’ the Doctor mumbles. ‘It seems that the coordinates shifted,’ there’s a loud and displeased sounding noise coming from the console and suddenly the lights in the room start flashing. ‘Okay! I entered the wrong coordinates. Happy?’ the noise stops and the lights dim slowly, and she cannot help but feel that TARDIS is grinning mischievously at both of them.

‘Okay, so re-enter the coordinates,’ she says. ‘Come on! You promised me a space marathon!’

‘Yeah, well, about that,’ Doctor says scratching his neck. ‘Before we go there, I need to fiddle with some settings. Because you see, we bounced right off of the wrong coordinates, which caused us to bump into some nasty time-burp, a little purple hole, which is a bit like a black hole but completely different. It feeds on the time vortex energy, got quite a bit from us, and that caused the thermo couplings to change polarity which may result in us going into a time loop. And that would be bad. Very bad. A long ride on a train and then 5 mile walk from good actually. Not to mention that you’d still have to take a taxi ride after that and-‘

‘Yes, okay, I get it!’ she says, because if she doesn’t interrupt him now, he won’t stop talking ever. And they’ll never go to the blasted marathon. ‘Do your thing. Change these thingies and take me to that marathon, please.’

At least, he starts working right away. He runs under the console – only once tripping on the stairs, which is a small success for him – puts on ridiculously looking googles and taking out various tools from his coat’s pockets. There’s a hammer, a screwdriver – a real one, not the sonic, a small saw and wait, is that a jack-plane? His tweaking with the cables results in another display of colourful sparks, his loud shouts and the lights in the console room going out.

Okay, that’s it. She agreed to travel with the most useless and technically-impaired man in the history of ever. Just her luck. Now she’ll be trapped with him for the rest of her life and sooner rather than later she will go just as insane. Splendid.

‘Clara!’ he whines and for a second she wishes she could see where he is and whack his head. ‘See, I encountered a small difficulty, it’s minor, really. I need to bring a few more thermo couplings from the storage room. The red ones, okay? I’ll take care of the lighting in the meantime. It’s just a minor glitch and by the time you’re back, we’ll go anywhere you like, eh?’

‘Yeah, sure. But where is the storage room?’

‘You go straight, then take the first left, then right, then down the stairs, then right, then choose the middle corridor and then left. No, wait, right. Left! Oh, you’ll find it! I put a plate on the door! It says ‘storage room’,’ he sounds so proud of himself that she doesn’t have the heart to make any kind of a snarky comment. She just sighs and slowly moves through the dark console room.

Thankfully, the corridors are bright, which is a bit of a miracle considering Doctor’s skills. She follows his instructions, she really does, but it seems that the bloody ship really has something against her. The corridors keep on switching and when she finds herself in the same place for the fifth time, she hits a wall in anger.

‘You bloody blue cow,’ she hisses angrily at the ship. ‘You don’t have to like me, that’s fine. Just let me find the storage room. Otherwise you’ll be stuck with me forever.’

The hum released by the ship is thoughtful and resigned, there’s a violent shake – again! – and she find herself pressed into a door with a plate saying ‘storage room’. The plate is written in Comic Sans. _Of course_.

She enters the room carefully, because the ship may still be out to get her – she does seem pretty vindictive. Once she sees what is inside the room, all thoughts about the petty revenge of the flying box are forgotten.

He was right. It is a storage room. The biggest storage room she has ever seen. It’s filled with boxes put on shelves, boxes standing on the ground, boxes standing on other boxes. How on earth is she supposed to find anything there, let alone thermo couplings? What do they even look like?

With a groan she sits by the nearest stack of boxes and opens the first of them. Okay. No thermo couplings. Instead there’s a whole family of stuffed owls. Great. Another box: a long and colourful scarf. Another: velvet clothes with _a lot_ of lace. Another box: ugly sweaters that look like they’ve been snagged from a thrift store. Another: a leather jacket and a trench coat. She goes through a few more: there are various memorabilia – or at least she thinks these are memorabilia – some stones and crystals, shining and glittering in her hands, postcards from places she never heard of. There’s also a box labeled with ‘IMPORTANT’, and for a second she hopes that she’ll find the couplings there, but to her disappointment the box is full of hats. A stetson with a hole in the middle lies on a top of the stack.

Another box: a pair of blood red and ridiculously high heels. They’re wrapped in paper and laid on a small cushion. Next one: a pair of handcuffs. Gosh, he is taking the whole police box thing a bit too seriously. Handcuffs? Really? Does he run around arresting people in his spare time?

The next box she opens is filled with photo albums. Considering that just a few days ago she saw him taking a selfie while haunting ghosts, she expects to see various pictures of him making stupid faces. And there are pictures of him, but not only of him. She goes through pages of pictures of a young red haired woman and a blonde haired man, the woman often has ridiculous face, the man looks at her with utmost love and devotion. There are also pictures of the Doctor trying to kiss the man on the cheek and trying to feed him something that looks like fish fingers. There are pictures of them all sitting on a beach, with a big ‘Space Rio’ sign behind them. But there are photos of other people as well: there are pics of a pretty young blonde, wearing a pink dress, with a bright smile on her face. She’s in the photo with another man – with spiky brown hair, wearing a trench coat she found in another box.

She skips through the rest of the albums quickly: there are memories of various faces, various people, various places. She’s about to get on her feet and look for the couplings somewhere else, when another album catches her eye. It is different than the rest: it’s heavy, bound in leather, with circular imprints on the cover. This album was hidden under the others. This album looks... forbidden. So of course, she opens it.

And she is disappointed. Because it looks like it’s another album with the standard ‘been there, done that’ pictures. But this time, in the pictures there are only two people: the Doctor and a mysterious woman with incredibly curly hair. It is a bit of a miracle that the hair doesn’t take up 90% of each photo, really. She flicks through a few pages: a picture of the woman piloting the TARDIS (what? how? note to self: ask the Doctor about it later), the same woman sleeping on a bed in an unidentified room, her dunking the Doctor in a swimming pool, a close-up of her ass in really tight pants. Well, finally it’s getting interesting! She flips another page: the same curly haired woman standing in some room, wearing a trench coat and the pair of red heels from the earlier box. A loud bang on the corridor makes her look up from the page and when she looks down to close the album, something on the page catches her eye. The woman is not wearing the coat anymore. Instead she’s wearing a tight red dress, with a slit up to her middle tight, the coat on a chair near her.

Wait.

It is impossible. The photos cannot move and change, can they?

But this one just did. Or maybe she’s slowly sliding into insanity. Who knows.

Another loud bang and a muffled ‘Clara’ makes her look up. It sounds like the Doctor is looking for her. She really should find the damn thermo couplings and get them to him. And she’s going to do it right noooo-

The woman in the picture is not wearing the dress anymore. Now, she’s wearing black knicers and a black corset that is doing wonders to her cleavage. The dress is laying in the floor.

Okay. She is clearly going insane. But there are worse ways to go. She could always be seeing monsters or giant spiders or hear voices. At least her insanity comes with nice visions. Let’s wait and see what happens next.

‘Here you are!’ Doctor barges through the door, the googles perched on his head, his face smudges with grease and dirt. ‘I’ve been looking for you for ages! Do you have any idea how long you’ve been gone? I thought you got lost! Now, did you find the couplings? Actually, forget about them. I managed to re-route the signal and now- CLOSE THAT ALBUM!’

His shout is so sudden that she jumps up and her movement sends the album in the air. The Doctor catches it with the grace she’d never suspect of him and cradles it protectively to his chest.

Oh. Suspicious.

‘Okay, so up you go! Everything’s sorted out, and we can go to that running thing! You wanted to go to the running thing, right?’ he babbles, keeping the album close to him. ‘Come on! The big running thing won’t wait for us forever!’

‘We are in a time machine. Besides, I have a question about this album,’ she smirks while she notices him swallow nervously. This is going to be good. ‘See, I think that I saw one of the photographs move.’

‘What! Don’t be ridiculous, Clara!’ the Doctor squeaks out quickly. Too quickly. ‘The photographs cannot move! You read too much Harry Potter! Now, come on. Big marathon thing? Aliens with twelve feet? Ringing any bells?’

‘In a second. But I am really sure that I saw that picture move. Come on, let’s look through it!’ she insists with an innocent smile on her face. The Doctor presses the album even closer to his chest and dark blush starts creeping up his neck.

‘But the marathon!’ he says pleadingly. ‘I will enter the right coordinates this time, I swear!’

‘The marathon can wait. A moving picture is something I have never seen before. And maybe I am wrong, maybe I was just seeing things, but if I’m right? Moving photos, how awesome it’d be? We could take them during the marathon!’

The blush on Doctor’s face gets darker with every second, his eyes widen comically and she’s pretty sure that the circulation in his arms has stopped some time ago. It’s time to drop the bomb.

‘Unless...,’ she pretends to hesitate. ‘Unless these are naughty pictures!’

Here we go: Doctor looks like a ripe and very panicked tomato. Mission accomplished, miss Clara!

‘What? No! No! Naughty pictures! Clara! That’s, that’s...’ he splutters and blushes even more. Oh, she’s never thought that someone could be this red. The more you learn.

‘No, you know, it’s okay. You are an adult even though you look like a 12-year-old. It’s normal that you have certain,’ she coughs, hiding her smile behind her hand ‘urges. It’s healthy!’

‘Clara!’ he hisses mortified. ‘These are private things!’

‘Clearly not that private if you don’t keep them in your bedroom,’ she teases and watches his eyes bulge at the implication. ‘But don’t worry dear,’ she pats his shoulder soothingly. ‘I didn’t see much. Just some woman taking her clothes off. I do not know how much you had to pay her to do that in front of you, but I am sure these were money well spent.’

She gets up and is about to exit the room when she hears him huffing behind her. Oh boy, that one must’ve hurt his pride.

‘For your information,’ he starts, ‘for your information, Miss I-Go-Through-Others’-Private-Pictures, I didn’t have to pay for any of it! It was all for free and the pleasure was mutual!’

As soon as the words leave his mouth, he puts a hand against it, eyes comically wide and even more panicked than before.

‘Oh my god. It is a snog box!’ she exclaims. ‘Or actually, it’s more like a shag box. Come on, tell me, who is she? No offense, but from what I’ve seen she is quite pretty. Not to mention the cleavage. And you’re... Well, have you even seen yourself?’

At that, he flails his arms around his head and points one finger at her.

‘You. Are. The. Most. Insufferable. Person. I. Have. Ever. Taken. On. Board!’ he says. ‘And it says something, considering that I travelled with Scots!’

She nods politely, with a small smile on her face.

‘You do realise that you just dropped the album to the floor and all the pictures fell out of it, do you?’ she says. ‘And look! They are definitely moving! Look at- what is it exactly? Is it what I think it is? Oh, come here!’

The Doctor drops to the floor with a high pitched scream, shielding the photos with his own body.

‘Okay, fine! I am not looking!’ she says through giggles. ‘Don’t want to be traumatised. Just tell me – will I ever meet this lady? She looks quite adventurous, if you know what I mean. Hmm, actually I am pretty sure you know what I mean,’ she winks and pats his head. ‘Okay, clean up here, I’ll be waiting in the console room. The big marathon won’t watch itself. Hurry up!’

She’s by the door and she can hear that he’s already cleaning up the photos and putting them where they belong.

‘Oh, and Doctor?’ she says over her shoulder. ‘If you have a sex tape, do hide it better, okay?’

She closes the door to his nervous groans and hurried shuffling of boxes.


End file.
